Tuesday, May 31, 2011

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Twitter Getting Photos In Order Ahead Of iOS 5 Integration Top
Yesterday, we first reported that Twitter was on the verge of launching their own photo-sharing service. That report has since been confirmed by Liz Gannes , who happens to work for All Things D, which is hosting a conference where Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was planning to announce this news. So, yeah. “Sources familiar with the matter.” Confirmed. And now we know a bit more. First of all, this move is a direct assault on services like TwitPic and yFrog. With Twitter Pictures, you’ll be able to upload from Twitter.com and the clients and you’ll get a nice, tidy URL that links to your picture (and a small thumbnail may now appear in your stream). We’ve heard that this might use the twimg.com URL that Twitter has used internally for a long time, but that’s not certain yet. And while it’s a direct assault on longstanding ecosystem players, we’ve also heard that Twitter did the right thing and reached out to these guys quite a long time ago. Specifically, we’ve heard that in January, Twitter sat down with a few of the major players to let them know their intentions to move into the space. Presumably, those guys will move into more white-label offerings now (maybe even with Twitter’s help in some way), rather than die off. So why is Twitter doing this? After all, the service is famous for having difficulties staying up as they scale — why get into the image business? Well, for one thing they may be using Amazon S3 to host the files rather then do it on their own servers. But more importantly, this is another move by Twitter to be more fully in control of their product. Some may point to the revenue that yFrog and others pull in from ads as playing into this, but that money is likely negligible to Twitter. It’s about owning the product. And they may have a very good reason for doing that right now. We’ve heard from multiple sources that Twitter is likely to have a big-time partner for such a service: Apple. Specifically, we’re hearing that Apple’s new iOS 5 will come with an option to share images to Twitter baked into the OS. This would be similar to the way you can currently share videos on YouTube with one click in iOS. Obviously, a user would have to enable this feature by logging in with their Twitter credentials in iOS. There would then be a “Send to Twitter” option for pictures stored on your device. Apple announced today that they plan to show off iOS 5 for the first time at WWDC next week, confirming a report of ours from March . Now you see why Twitter would want to get this picture service out there ASAP. And why they’d want their own service. No word on other photo players — namely Facebook and Flickr — also being baked into iOS 5. But Apple does have deals with both of those companies for iPhoto, so it would make some sense. More to come, I’m sure. CrunchBase Information Twitter Apple Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Under The Covers At Katango: Kleiner Perkins' First sFund Investment Top
Last October, Kleiner Perkins launched the sFund , a $250 million initiative designed to make strategic investments in entrepreneurs building social services and apps. The partners contributing to the fund include Facebook, Amazon, Zynga, Comcast, and more. The first startup to receive investment from the sFund was Cafebots , which received $5 million in series A from Kleiner shortly thereafter. At the time of the announcement, Cafebots was in stealth mode and was tight-lipped about just what kind of social service it was building. My colleague MG Siegler did, however, learn that the startup was hoping to expose users to a new, yet referential acronym: “FRM”, or “friend relationship management”. Of course, not everyone is familiar with CRM (customer relationship management) and some might miss this tongue-in-cheek reference. Today, we’ve had the chance to learn a little more about the Kleiner-backed startup ahead of its impending launch in June, and how it’s moving past “FRM” to embrace a more accessible descriptor of its business: “personal crowd control”. The company has also changed its name from Cafebots to Katango. Why Katango? Your guess is as good as mine. But probably because it has “tango” in the title. Duh. So what will “personal crowd control” mean for future Katango users? Katango wants to simplify your online social life. Tired of my equivocal description yet? During Katango’s development, the team embarked on a bit of market research, reaching out to over 9K people using Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social communication services to find out what was missing from the social experience. As you might expect, people love social services (the numbers don’t lie), but consistently identified two particular pain points in today’s social service experience: Firstly, users don’t want to share every part of their life with every single person they happen to be connected to, whether on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Second, sending particular information to a specific group of contacts or friends takes time and usually involves creating a group email, or group text, etc. In other words, it’s a hassle. Kantango VP of Product Yee Lee (who is also a former early PayPal employee) used the example of a photo he snapped of his young son in an amusing pose; he wanted to send this photo to his immediate family and certain friends he knew would appreciate it on Facebook, but there aren’t any tools to parse contacts in order to share with just the right people. Obviously, the examples of are many. I run across this problem every day. Today, social platforms are a fire hose of information, but we need them to be more laser-focused. Facebook has ramped up their privacy settings (after some cajoling) and allows you to share certain parts of your profile with everyone, or friends of friends, or just your friends. You can customize, too, but it’s still a blanket solution. I don’t want all of my wall posts to only be shared with certain friends, and I don’t want to customize my settings for each post. Thus, the Katango team, which includes Co-founder and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford Yoav Shoham and two of his recently graduated PhD students Mike Munie and Thuc Vu , spent the better part of two years honing algorithms that would tackle this problem by allowing the user to view relevant subsets of a contact list within social sharing platforms, and then send selected content just to those relevant groups. For example, a Katango user will be able to connect his or her Facebook profile to Katango, which will then organize Facebook friends into high school friends, college friends, former professional colleagues, and so on, allowing the user to share the information with specific groups. Shoham equated what the startup is building to “Plaxo 3.0″, and says that Katango plans to integrate with as many social platforms as possible — this won’t just be a Facebook tool. I had a chance for a quick demo of Katango’s service, and so far, it looks great. The UX and UI are simple and easy to navigate, and the sorting algorithms were very accurate. I’ll wait until I see a final product before I drop the gavel of judgement, but I can tell you that from what I’m seeing, this could be a tool one might incorporate into the everyday social sharing experience. CrunchBase Information CafeBots Katango Yoav Shoham Yee Lee Information provided by CrunchBase
 
(Exclusive) YouTube's New Strategy: Create a Network Of Networks Top
YouTube is now showing approximately 3 billion videos a day. A growing proportion of those are shown with ads—more than 2 billion a week —and YouTube as a business is expected to pass $1 billion in revenue next year. But when it comes to making money, some videos do better than others. Professionally-produce videos attract the most ad dollars. These include videos from TV networks and major media companies, which is the low-hanging fruit, but also increasingly from Web-only video networks and studios such as Blip.tv , Maker Studios , and Revision3 . A big part of YouTube’s strategy is to encourage and promote these native Web networks. It bought one of the biggest ones, Next New Networks, and that team is now training other video producers how to replicate their results. For YouTube, it is all about scale, and networks of loosely aligned online video producers scale better than individual shows and viral-video phenoms. In fact, there is a brand new department inside YouTube called Networks that reports to global head of content Dean Gilbert . The purpose of the department is encourage the formation of these outside networks which then use YouTube as their distribution channel. YouTube can then help sell advertising targeted at these more professional networks of Web series and shows, and that scales better than supporting individual YouTube producers. YouTube will keep doing that, of course, but you can see the beginnings of an organization that will help to further professionalize the Web video industry. In this view, each network is like a channel, and YouTube is the new cable system or MSO (multiple system operator). The ABCs and Food Networks are welcome on YouTube, but Networks is very much an attempt to grow native channels on the Web. If YouTube gives them enough support and makes it profitable enough for the Web-only networks, they in turn will be able to pay more for native Web shows and series, and one day the best talent might even skip TV altogether. But first, baby steps. CrunchBase Information YouTube Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Twitter Follows The Tweet Button With A Follow Button, Sort Of Like Their Like Button Top
There’s a button war going on around us. Google, Digg, Yahoo, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn — they’ve all been angling to get their buttons in prime real estate on big websites. But two players loom larger in the space than anyone else: Facebook and Twitter. And Twitter just escalated the war a bit today. Twitter has just unveiled the Follow Button. This follows their Tweet Button which is already in use on thousands of websites across the web. While the Tweet Button was great for sharing individual pieces of content, the Follow Button is meant to establish more social connections on the service. In this regard, it’s sort of like the Facebook Like Button, which people place on their websites to get other Facebook users to tie themselves to brands remotely. Of course, the Like Button also acts a bit like the Tweet Button as well (that is, you can share individual pieces of content from it too). Confused yet? Twitter’s dual-button concept is actually pretty simple. The Tweet Button is to share stuff. The Follow Button is to establish connections with other Twitter users remotely. So if we were to add a Follow Button to the sidebar on TechCrunch, with one click, you could follow our account . This is something Twitter has tried to do a bit with the Tweet Button pop-up (you can have it show the affiliated site account, for example), but this is a lot easier to understand. Though it also seems like this is a part of what they were doing with @anywhere — whatever happened to that anyway? And again, it’s all a part of Twitter’s movement towards a stronger social graph with more connections. This will also help with discovery since Twitter is launching the Follow Button on over 50 high-profile sites including places like our sister sites AOL.com, About.me, and Huffington Post. And big sites like IMDb, MTV.com, Lady Gaga’s site, Jennifer Lopez’s site, and others. You can find out more and make your own Follow Button here . CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase
 
VMware Acquires Enterprise Microblogging Platform Socialcast Top
VMware has acquired social communications platform Socialcast. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Socialcast, which raised nearly $10 million in funding, combines a corporate activity stream that ties into CRM and ERP systems with social bookmarking, Outlook and SharePoint integrations, mobile (iPhone and Blackberry) and desktop (Air) apps, and analytics. Co-workers can share knowledge and updates in a semi-private setting. The company, which has over 7000 customers, offers both hosted and behind-the-firewall options. The company recently launched Socialcast Reach , which allows companies to bring these conversations into applications that employees are most familiar with, like CRMs, so that they don't have to leave their work to view contextual information from the communications platform. For VMware, Socialcast expands its reach into social enterprise. The space is competitive, with a number of players like Salesforce, Yammer and Jive all vying for customers. It looks like VMware will now have a presence win the space with Socialcast’s offering. From the release: VMware’s vision is to transform the traditional PC desktop by equipping today’s mobile workforce with secure access to applications and data from any location and any device, while driving increased productivity through modern collaboration and communication models. These new collaboration models promise to better support modern work streams, that are increasingly more iterative and interconnected, as information is assembled and coordinated among virtual teams that cut across organizations. VMware has been on a bit of an acquisition spree of late, recently buying Shavlik Tehcnologies, and SlideRocket. We’ve pasted the release below. UPDATING VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced the acquisition of Socialcast, a leading provider of social collaboration solutions for the enterprise. Socialcast enables modern business communication by uniting people, information and enterprise applications within collaborative communities. Delivered as a hosted service, private cloud implementation, or via an on-premise solution, Socialcast is used by some of the world’s largest enterprises including Avaya, Humana, Nokia, Philips Electronics, SAS and VMware. Terms of the acquisition were not announced. Socialcast joins the recent acquisitions of SlideRocket™ and Zimbra™, along with the introduction of VMware Horizon App Manager™, in helping advance VMware’s vision for a modern end-user computing model. VMware’s vision is to transform the traditional PC desktop by equipping today’s mobile workforce with secure access to applications and data from any location and any device, while driving increased productivity through modern collaboration and communication models. These new collaboration models promise to better support modern work streams, that are increasingly more iterative and interconnected, as information is assembled and coordinated among virtual teams that cut across organizations. “The post-PC era will be defined by a new way to work that is increasingly social, real-time and collaborative,” said Brian Byun, vice president and general manager, Cloud Applications, VMware. “For enterprise collaboration to improve business outcomes it can’t just be a feature in a single application. Organizations need a new social collaboration fabric across the applications people already work with. Socialcast combines real-time activity streams that are contextually integrated within existing enterprise systems. This is the new way to work.” “The future of work will be focused on people-centric collaboration, bringing diverse groups of employees together to accelerate business performance,” said Timothy Young, founder and CEO, Socialcast. “We’ve seen Socialcast transform the way that people work at some of the world’s largest companies, and we’re excited to bring the benefits of social computing to VMware’s more than 250,000 customers.” A New Way to Work in the Cloud More than ever, enterprises are dealing with two fundamental client computing pain points — providing secure access to an increasingly mobile workforce; and managing the burgeoning diversity of data, applications and devices needed to run their business. These challenges result from the transformative nature of cloud computing and the coming post-PC era. In this environment, a new way to work will be required. The growing VMware End-User Computing portfolio seeks to free end users and IT organizations from more than two decades of complex, device-centric computing and deliver a more user-centric, consumer cloud experience for the enterprise. This approach to personal computing will enable organizations to leverage public cloud resources while extending existing security models and providing access to applications and data from any device, where and when a user needs it. Establishing a new end-user computing model is a fundamental component of the VMware vision for IT as a Service — the transformation of IT to a more business-centric approach, focusing on outcomes such as operational efficiency, self service, competitiveness and rapid response. This means IT will shift from producing IT services to optimizing production and consumption of those services in ways consistent with business requirements. This will change the role of IT from a cost center to a center of strategic value.
 
Design Changes The Way We Experience The Web Top
Fitim Blaku is a Software Engineer and Web Designer based in New York City. He specializes in creating immersive web designs and applications. His consulting group WebHD focuses on maximizing web revenue through increased user engagement. Technology moves fast. Flat screen TV's are everywhere, touch screen phones dominate mobile, and video games are pushing the graphical boundaries into reality. On the other hand, websites, which serve as the virtual representation of all commerce, look the same way they did two decades ago. Despite the fact that the web accounts for more revenue than all of the previous mentioned mediums combined, providing a truly engaging web experience remains a low priority for virtually all businesses. An interface is what facilitates the dialogue between your user and your product. Everything your business represents is communicated through your website's interface and the experience it provides. Key metrics like customer satisfaction, user retention and the amount of time people spend on your site are heavily influenced by the level of engagement you choose to provide. The more engaging your site, the longer people stick around. This generates activity, people consume more information and click more ads. Great design is a tremendously valuable asset that encourages high levels of engagement. The potential for untapped revenue by applying great designs to your website is tremendous. Is there a market for this? Do people want to see and experience exciting new designs and interfaces? Sure — Have you seen how great iPad apps look? They're gorgeous, vibrant and provide users with aesthetically pleasing interfaces to interact with. The result is that Apple can't make iPads fast enough. Build Immersive Web Experiences By using technology which already exists today, we can add new layers and dimensions to websites. Marvelous capabilities already exist for every browser (and they have for years), but they are being underutilized. Recent advancement in JavaScript coding techniques and improvements in CSS provide designers an easy way make use of three very powerful and engaging techniques: motion, depth and time, all without the need for plug-ins. The difference when using these techniques is not a subtle change, but a drastic revision of what the web can do. How hard is it to go back to standard television once you've seen that same picture in high definition? (A proof of concept of an immersive website . I presented this at TechCrunch Disrupt New York last year) These techniques provide the platform for creativity to flourish, and its usefulness has been ignored by designers and businesses. All that is required is some creativity, room for experimentation and a bit of freedom and hard work on the part of the designer. Make it your top priority to keep users on your site longer. Give them a reason to stay and engage with your brands and products. Utilize your designers to their capacity and let them do what they're capable of. Businesses spend millions to get users to their websites, but once they're there, they let them look at a static page that looks like a brochure. But you've worked hard to get that user to your site — why not get more for your investment? Great Designs Increase User Engagement I have a hypothesis… To engage your users further, make your website more engaging. Then websites stand to generate much more revenue by engaging visitors that they already have. The result is your users spend more time on your site and make you more money. This provides a boost to the effectiveness of your marketing effort on the most fundamental level. You can increase the value of every current user and new user that ever comes to your site. A great example of this would be Amazon. If Amazon's website was more aesthetically pleasing, vibrant, or visually coherent — imagine the increase in sales they would see because users start spending more time on their site. Traditional retailers like WalMart and Target spend big money to improve the look and feel of all their stores. That's because it's well understood that providing a comfortable environment for customers is extremely influential on sales. The lighting's got to be just right, colors need to be easy on the eyes, all to make people feel it's the right time to make a purchase. But online businesses still have not yet seen the real value or potential in this: the visual and experience factor. You should act on this. Your users do care. The web is evolving fast, the way you interact with it is going to start changing soon. (This fully animated website tells a story in the background over a 30 second timeline) Experiment, Iterate and Track How do these new design techniques work? The jQuery animate() function in JavaScript is the key enabler. It's extremely powerful and an underutilized tool set (it's free and open source) that lets you do a lot of the graphical animations that only Flash traditionally provided. With it you can move any single part of a web page around the screen smoothly. It provides fading for pictures, images, text, backgrounds or even moving Flash objects. By tightly integrating the tools available to us as designers, you open the doors to higher levels of engagement while building on top of what already works. The application of these techniques begins with a change in the way you approach designing a website. Change your philosophy. Create a true virtual environment where time and space do exist, it's up to your designers to make users almost feel like they're there. What do users feel when they use your website? You can help make them feel better by creating a sense of liveliness and rich user interaction within the context of a well-thought out experience. Play around with different color themes and provide more interactive interfaces. Depth, time and motion can exist in a website and they are available for you to use. With the right design you can captivate your audience, deliver a more convincing message and build new revenue opportunities. All you need to do is develop a well-thought out experience for your customers. You are opening a new and powerful form of communication with them by doing so.
 
WHO Assessment Puts Cell Phone Use At "Possibly Carcinogenic" Top
The World Health Organization has just released the findings of a major literature review by leading scientists in the fields of cancer and radiation. Their conclusion? We need more data, but it’s looking as if wireless communications are, at the very least, not not carcinogenic. The only positive data were deemed too “limited” or “inadequate” to permit the group to say there’s a definite link, though they saw fit to give it a 2B rating , “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” Continue reading…
 
Whoops Redux: Looks Like Partner Just Leaked Google's +1 Button For Websites Launch Top
Oh, Google. Hate to do this again , but you really need to lock up these partners and get your PR in order. A week after we got a pitch from a partner NFC company all-but-confirming that Google’s New York City event would be about their mobile payment system ( Google Wallet ), another partner has reached out ahead of another announcement. This time, an email seemingly confirms that Google is going to launch their +1 button for websites tomorrow. Here’s the deal: Google reached out to us earlier to see if we’d be interested in getting some “big” news under embargo. We hate embargoes, but Google is generally good at holding them so we play ball from time to time (plus our “sometimes accept embargoes, sometimes don’t” policy keeps everyone on their toes). Anyway, we agreed to hear what Google’s news is. But they haven’t actually told us what the news is yet because our briefing isn’t until later today. So we can’t possibly know what we’re under embargo for. So we’re not under embargo. Plus, if a partner is sending us unsolicited emails telling us what is being announced, all bets are off anyway. In this case, Clearspring’s PR company, New Venture Communications, has written us to say that: “I understand that Google planned to reach out to you about the new Google +1 button for websites that they'll be unveiling shortly. I thought you might be interested in speaking with Hooman Radfar, CEO of Clearspring, about the company's role as a launch partner for Google +1.” So, we can probably expect a +1 button tomorrow with Clearspring’s AddThis tool on board to serve it up. A bit more: The +1 button is designed to help publisher's content stand out in search results by giving users the ability to +1 content. The more chances users get to +1 content, the more likely publishers' URLs are to show up in search results with +1 annotations. This helps users highlight which results are most useful and helps publishers better engage with their audience. You may recall that earlier this month, Google “accidentally” leaked their +1 Chrome extension via a commercial. That extension is still not available. The +1 button is slightly different in that publishers would presumably be able to embed it on their own sites. Given that this can alter the way Google Search results are served up , this is potentially a big deal. Presumably, we’ll be under embargo shortly on all of this, so expect to hear more tomorrow. Heh. Unless a partner emails us more details first! CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Disrupt Backstage Pass: So What, Exactly, Is Social Music? (TCTV) Top
Welcome to the Jang and Ljung show. Steve Jang, who is the founder of Soundtracking and Alexander Ljung who is the founder of Sound Cloud. Guys you just did a panel about social music. I'm still a bit confused about what it is. What is social music? Well, for me, we think a lot about social sounds in general. For us that's basically 3 different parts. One is music, which is basically just how big artists that we know, how they share music and how they allow people to interact with that music. But it's also a big part about anybody out there being able to now create music and share that with their friends. But it's also, outside of music, I think it's also about audio so everything like PodCasts, news organizations, any kind of audio out there, and this emerging field of social sounds as well where people can be walking down the street capturing a sound or a thought they have and share that around the web. So I think for us, like, social sound is about anything where people are sharing sounds and creating experiences with other people with, sort of, that sound as a spark. Steve, it all sounds a bit like Napster. What's different between what you're doing and Napster? Well, ours is...our app actually has nothing similar to Napster. Our app is an iPhone app, which allows you to geotag music as you experience it in the real world. So, wherever you are, you can take out your iPhone, or your iPod Touch, or your iPad, and if there's a song playing on the speaker system at a restaurant or a cafe or in the car on the radio, or you're at a show, or you're just walking in a park with your headphones on, you can tag that music to a specific geolocation and then you can add a photo as well - of the scenery or the surroundings - and then add a comment. And so, all of this is in one sort of musical postcard that you can send from your iPhone, and you can post it to Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. It allows you to essentially check in, but also check in a song, but also express yourself. There 's a community, a sound tracking community that's behind this mobile first application. So we're really all about self expression, as opposed to any type of consumption model, around. So you're aggregating data which connects music and location. Music, location, taste, you can like, love, and comment, to other people's sound tracks as well, as they happen in real time. So we have an activity feed where you can see people around the world and people you're following in your own neighborhood and city. And be able give feedback to people. I think social is kind of a misnomer at this point, actuallyimplies that there's other online music product that is not social. I think even the most traditional legacy music products that are online have added social features. Well, a lot of people listen to music on their own, right? I mean, Alexander Sound Cloud is a bit further ahead than Steve's Startup. Where are you at and what are you doing? So, we're really about trying to make sound a key part of the web in the same way that we think about how text, photos and videos are key parts of the web. We have all this massive amount of awesome photos and videos and stuff that a lot of us together have created them that make up large parts of the web. We feel that sound hasn't been as common on the web and it's just about to happen now as people learn to express things, a lot of different things through music, through other types of sound, and for us, the web in general. Some of the really exciting things that have happened has been around how it's become simpler to create stuff, no matter if it's a Tweet, taking a photo, or whatever. And then you can call it social or whatever you want to call it. But plugging people into that. So you make it simple to create and then you plug in people so that you have to share it, you got some feedback on whatwhat it is you have created and then through that you have a great experience of sharing and then getting feedback.
 

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